DX 11 Battle - Nvidia vs ATI

Nvidia released a video yesterday showing a benchmarking test between the GeForce GTX 480 (the new DX11 GPU based on the revolutionary Fermi architecture) and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 (ATI's flagship single GPU DX 11 card).

While you would expect the GTX 480's almost 1 billion more transistors (3 billion compared to 2.15 billion) to give it a distinct advantage over the HD 5870, the Fermi flagship is not as spectacularly ahead as we thought it would be. However, the Unigine Heaven benchmark is probably not the best grounds for comparison, and stresses the 480's tesselation performance over the 5870. We can only wait for the GTX 480 to actually come out, before we can run more detailed (with several gaming and graphics benchmarks) head-to-head tests between the two GPU monsters and get a better picture of how they rack up against each other.